A Drop in the Bucket: Randomized Controlled Trials Testing Reading and Math Interventions

The purpose of this study was to determine the proportion of empirical studies published in the last 5 years in a sample of special education peer‐reviewed journals that (1) assessed the effects of reading and math interventions with group designs and (2) used random assignment to treatment conditions to test those interventions. A hand search of articles from the Journal of Special Education, Exceptional Children, Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, the Journal of Learning Disabilities, and School Psychology Review yielded 806 relevant articles, of which 5.46 percent tested a reading or math intervention using a group design and 4.22 percent used random assignment. These findings indicate that randomized experimental designs, which offer the highest level of evidence of an intervention's efficacy, are underrepresented in the literature, at least in the area of reading and math interventions.     

Rats do show primacy and recency effects in memory for lists of spatial locations: A reply to Gaffan

It has been demonstrated that rats display both primacy and recency effects in list-learning experiments for both item- and order-recognition memory for spatial location information. Contrary to a suggestion made by Gaffan (1992) that previous demonstrations of primacy effects in rats are not valid due to statistical and methodological problems, we show that (1) it is not likely that our results are due to experimenter bias and/or nonindependence of trials, (2) primacy and recency effects are obtained whether or not one uses a training criterion, and (3) when many of the published reports from our laboratory are combined, the number of subjects and trials are sufficient to evaluate the validity of primacy and recency effects in list-learning experiments.     

Effects of weight on children's educational achievement

In this paper, we investigate the association between weight and children's educational achievement, as measured by scores on Peabody Individual Achievement Tests in math and reading, and grade attainment. Data for the study came from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), which contains a large, national sample of children between the ages of 5 and 12 between 1986 and 2004. We obtained estimates of the association between weight and achievement using several regression model specifications that controlled for a variety of observed characteristics of the child and his or her mother, and time-invariant characteristics of the child. Our results suggest that, in general, children who are overweight or obese have achievement test scores that are about the same as children with average weight.     

Instructional design approaches for improving a course in productivity and work measurement

This article explores the teaching styles of the professor, learning styles of the students, characteristics of the students, comparisons of Pearson's correlation coefficients between student grades earned in the course versus their cumulative grade point averages, and factors to consider for future Web‐enhanced courses. The objectives of the course were to develop students' understanding of productivity and work measurement. It also explored the ability to understand and apply systems thinking and innovative planning for the purpose of improving personal productivity, the productivity of other people, and the productivity of systems and organizations.